A not so short history of Adblock
Disclaimer: This is the history of Adblock as I remember it. If I made a mistake somewhere or left out something important please contact me.
How it all started
The original version of Adblock was developed by Henrik Aasted Sorensen in 2002. It was a small nifty extension that would block ads (only images) according to the filters you defined. And you could already right-click on an image and choose “Adblock” from the context menu. Everything else was also pretty similar to Adblock as we know it now.
Last Adblock version maintained by Henrik Aasted Sorensen was Adblock 0.3. This version had one major flaw: it was allowing the ads to load and only when page loading was completed would it hide them. This limited the usefulness of this extension considerably.
The 0.4 series
Starting with Adblock 0.4 (around beginning of 2003) the official developer of Adblock is rue (nobody knows his real name). Adblock 0.4 used XBL to prevent ads from appearing. This worked well and now even objects like Flash or Java could be blocked. But while you didn’t see the ads any more they still would be downloaded.
The unholy tradition to call every release of Adblock a developer/nightly build also came up with Adblock 0.4. As of this moment the last officially stable release of Adblock still is Adblock 0.3. So it came that when I (Wladimir Palant) discovered Adblock in June 2003 the version I found was Adblock 0.3. There was neither an indication that the project had a new owner nor that a new version of Adblock had been developed.
Making of Adblock 0.5
After using Adblock 0.3 a little I decided that there must be a better way block ads. I discovered content policies and was able to use them for ad blocking. This approach had the advantage that ads wouldn’t even be downloaded. Furthermore background images, scripts and stylesheets could now be blocked as well. I’ve implemented my own Adblock 0.4 and sent it in. And I was rather surprised to receive an answer from rue and to learn that Adblock has been developed further.
A long discussion on the merits of the two approaches followed. In the end the content policies made it into the official Adblock but XBL wasn’t dropped until much later. This was the start of Adblock 0.5.
What else made it from my Adblock into the official Adblock? Not much. The code to flash the page elements corresponding to the selected address did. The ancestors of the current “object tabs” did. The window to list all blockable items on the page did — and this is the one contribution I’m least proud of. My only excuse is that this window was never meant to be used the way Adblock uses it now.
At the same time rue has made some decisions I was concerned about. For example Adblock would go through Mozilla’s menu looking for conflicting shortcuts and remove them. More long discussions followed, without any result, so I gave up and ignored Adblock for a while.
Arrival of Adblock Plus 0.5
The development of Adblock stalled shortly afterwards. No real progress has been made in 2004 and at the beginning of 2005 the development stopped entirely. That’s when Michael McDonald aka mcm came in and created an enhanced version of Adblock called Adblock Plus to provide the desperately needed features.
The most important contribution was undoubtedly whitelisting that allowed to define exceptions from the usual filter rules. Further notable enhancements were the option to synchronize filters with a remote source and 16 localizations of the extension. The user interface has also been improved.
The situation became ridiculous when no update for Adblock arrived in time for the Firefox 1.5 release (November 2005). Here again Michael McDonald had to provide a compatible version of Adblock. The official update arrived more than one month later.
My reappearance
The missing update for Firefox 1.5 forced me to look at Adblock again. As there seemed to be no active development on Adblock 0.5 (everybody working on the mysterious Adblock 0.6) I offered rue to rewrite Adblock 0.5 and eliminate its numerous shortcomings. When this rewrite arrived I found myself involved in a familiar useless discussion. There was talk about picking parts out of my rewrite while keeping the horrible user interface unchanged. Having learned my lesson from the past I couldn’t agree to this again.
I contacted Michael McDonald who found my rewrite interesting. He wasn’t planning to develop Adblock Plus further so we agreed on transferring project ownership to me. My rewrite was to become the next version of Adblock Plus, thus making Adblock Plus a separate extension and not merely an enhanced version of Adblock. It was published in January 2006 as Adblock Plus 0.6.
And what now?
Now there are three versions of Adblock being used. One is Adblock 0.5 that suddenly started developing again and took over some features from Adblock Plus 0.5. Michael McDonald has changed to the Adblock project and hopefully will be able to push it into the right direction.
The other is my Adblock Plus 0.6 that has a strong focus on usability. The idea is not just to have a powerful extension but also to provide its features in such a way that they are self-explaining and easy to use.
And then there is Adblock Plus 0.5 that is still used by people who didn’t like the radical changes in Adblock Plus 0.6. Michael McDonald promised to provide compatibility and security updates for it, it isn’t developed further though.
Update (2006-09-28): Time has passed and it seems that this outlook was too optimistic. While Adblock Plus has certainly advanced and is at version 0.7.1.2 by now, the Adblock project has been abandoned once again. According to MozDev’s list of abandoned projects, the last changes to this project have been made one day before Adblock Plus 0.6 was released. The only Adblock developer seen since February is Michael McDonald, and he was made co-developer only nominally — he doesn’t have access to anything. Even when I discovered a security hole in Adblock in May no Adblock developer was reachable and addons.mozilla.org had to give Michael McDonald upload priviledges so he could fix this issue. You heard right — Adblock 0.5.3.043 available at the moment is not an official update, and the Adblock website does in fact offer Adblock 0.5.3.042, still with the security hole.
Wladimir Palant